HAWK

CHAPTER NINE: WORM (1/5)

'Where the hell have you been?!' Dante shouted.

Kas closed the door behind her and held up a finger, telling Dante to wait a moment. Her shoulders were rising and falling as she fought for control of her lungs. She'd deliberately taken a longer and more complicated route back in case Astell tried to follow her and she hadn't stopped running for just over twenty minutes. She could at least be confident that she'd made it back alone.

'Long story,' she panted. 'Tell you later. Where's Worm?'

'Worm? Oh, you mean the kid. What kind of name's Worm for a little girl, anyway?'

'What kind of name's Dante?'

'Careful - Dante was my grandmother's name.'

'So where is she?'

'Dead.'

'Not your grandmother - Worm.'

'She's around. You didn't tell me she was a genius. If I didn't know any better, I'd say she was convent.'

'That's the way it looks, but she hasn't said and I haven't asked, and I don't want you to ask her either.'

'I wasn't planning to.'

'Good. So stop trying to distract me and tell me where she is.'

Dante shrugged and turned away. 'She's in one of the modules.'

Kas's eyes bulged. 'She's what?! Are you kidding me?!'

'She was using the X1 like a climbing frame, it was getting annoying.'

'So you put her in a module?! She's a kid!'

'I didn't put her in it, she climbed in by herself. I just haven't taken her out yet.'

'How long has she been in there?'

'Barely an hour. And don't worry, she can't access anything too heavy. I've taken all modules offline to free up my CPU's for your databeam analysis. The kid's stuck with the demos - they're all child safe.'

Kas was shaking her head but she had no energy left to argue. Worm was smart and it took more than a few hours to get addicted to modules.

Let her have some fun...

'You've timed your arrival well,' Dante said. 'I'm nearly done.'

'Nearly done with what?'

Dante turned back to her and smiled. 'The databeam. The analysis is almost complete.'

* * *

Dante lifted the top of her large desk like an old-fashioned car bonnet, revealing a sixty-inch true-res screen on its underside. The computer wasn't in the desk, Kas knew - it was all around them.

The five-thousand nanosheet computers that lined the walls were all connected to one another, creating a single large supercomputer. Their little white port lights had begun to glitter at a terrific speed, transforming the den's disco into a rave.

'Here we go,' Dante said finally as if she was a DJ about to drop the heaviest bass line of the century. 'Analysis... complete.'

The port lights suddenly stopped flickering and began blinking in unison, a gentle pulsing glow that felt to Kas like the den's heartbeat. Kas looked at the true-res screen and saw it was filled with an endless flow of green text, indecipherable to her and not too dissimilar to the kind she was used to seeing on Hik's visor. She took a step forward and stood shoulder to shoulder with Dante. Though Kas had no idea what the text said, Dante seemed to be reading it like a book.

'What are we looking at?' Kas asked.

'A code,' Dante replied from her trance.

'Can you read it?'

'Some. But if it is what I think it is, it's not good.'

'Why not?'

'Because it looks like a worm.'

'Like a virus?'

'Exactly. Worms are designed to infect a system and replicate. Their purpose is to spread to every compatible computer they come into contact with and replicate again and again and again until there's nowhere left to spread to. There's a lot of information here. It would take me months to read through it all - maybe years.'

'Years?'

'Don't worry. I've still got a few tricks up my sleeve yet.'

Dante made a signal with her hand and the code disappeared. 'Mr Whiskers, run data through SpyGlass six-point-four.'

A small dot appeared in the centre of the screen and grew into a one-foot square of morphing colours that drifted away from the screen's surface towards Kas. Kas suppressed the urge to reach out and touch it.

'Wrote this software myself,' Dante said. 'Haven't used it in almost a decade, but it might provide a few more answers.'

The square broke apart into four smaller ones, then each of those split again, becoming sixteen, then again, and again and again until it became impossible to see anything but a mass of tiny coloured dots. The dots then transformed in the air, bending and repositioning themselves into a 3D shape which started to look something like an egg. Four tubes extruded themselves from the egg's surface - two on either side of the top and two from the bottom. Its shell tightened, losing its curves and becoming angular and rigid. Dante let out a small gasp, and the realisation hit Kas a split second later.

The model of an X1 was a little crude but impossible to deny. The bulky, humanoid structure. The precise, modular limbs. The low rounded dome atop its shoulders.

Kas turned to look at Hik who was still standing silently in the corner, the green digits rolling over his emotionless face... and she remembered her fear of him. She turned back and saw that the model had completed its transformation and was now a perfect rendering of an X1.

'This has come straight from the data?' she asked.

Dante nodded. 'I don't have a model of an X1 in my archives - not this detailed, anyway. This was buried in the signal.'

'So what does it mean?'

'It means we now know what kind of computer the virus is designed to hack.'

Kas felt a shiver roll down her spine. 'X1's.'